Shit. One word that has come to be so profoundly generic that it can be used in a variety of scenarios. From the proverbial shit to the literal shit. It can be found any and everywhere. In essence, its part life itself. We eat and we shit. And we trudge along repeating the same process every day. The harmony of our entire body symbolized in the process that converts what we put in our mouth to what we excrete from our bowels. And come to think of it, our digestive tract just might be the most indiscriminate equalizer on the planet. From expensive escargot and foie gras to the crumbles of starch laden bread. It all gets converted to shit. Sure it might be deposited in open farmlands of India or the golden bidet of Sultan of Brunei, but ultimately it vanishes into the earth and enriches it in parts. Our life surmised in shit.

I have a high metabolism which leads to more than one trip to the office bathroom. A place that I dread. Not because of the perfunctory smell for our nose gets accustomed to it. Much like the way eyes get routined to the darkness. Not because of the awkwardness that creeps up slowly as you stand next to your boss's boss at the urinals. There are no social etiquettes guiding this encounter. Your penis anxiety preventing the flow downstream and your eyes fidgeting for walls to focus on. Those seconds seem to elongate and stick like the wax stretched thinly on the skin. No, none of the above reasons send ripples through my spine quite like the possibility of having sonorous innards orchestrating a symphony in the adjacent stall. Its the most disingenuous of sounds. You can't quite figure it out until it takes a hold of the enclosed space. And then the Bathroom Philharmonic Orchestra begins in earnest. The woodwind to my right and the percussion to my left. And it's all too frequent an occurance that I am led to believe that I have more than one Mozart in the office. It's an unrelenting undulating sound that you have to suffer through for as long as you are in the stall.

And yet, despite all the statements to the contrary I take a perverse pleasure in this daily ritual. The sanctity of the industrial gray and white environ bringing a profound solace. The one shrine of respite from the world at large. It is in this time of seclusion that I am at my most productive. I rummage through the trending stories on guardian, look at stocks, thumb down the Instagram feed and get my daily finger flicks of Tinder all in a matter of minutes. In fact, I wrote most of this piece while sitting in the stall too; the sonic booms coaxing my soul to quiver. And now I can't feel my legs. Time to go out and face my bombastic bête noir.